Bouncy Ball Animation

Since we are in the animation rotation, we finished our first animation today. We animated a bouncy ball bouncing on a loop in photoshop. For our first time ever animating something, I think we all did pretty good.

The Process

We started by putting in the sky and the ground and then adding in the ball. We had separate layers for each ball to show how it would bounce. Once we had every layer for the ball, my sister and I decided to play around with some of the other features on photoshop and see what they did. We both added in grass and a gradient to the top of the land layer. I really wanted to do little tufts of grass, but I had no idea where to do that or how to do that. I added clouds and a gradient into the sky layer to make it look a bit more realistic than it already had been with just the blue. Around this point was when we found a way to put in shadows. I made one shadow on the last frame before it hit the ground and nothing else. It took me up until we began to animate it to realize that maybe I should add shadows to the other frames to make it realistic. Without the other ones there would have been a shadow that appeared and disappeared out of nowhere. I'm glad that i got the other shadows in, even if they don't flow terribly well. After that we went into timeline and turned them all into frames.

The Aftermath

During this lesson I learned for the first time how to animate and how to actually use photoshop. I've seen photoshop used a lot, but I've never really known how to use it or how it works so it was really interesting to finally use it. We learned what does what and how to get to everything. We learned about the rules of animation and how to apply them. We mostly focused on squash and stretch. I never realized that you had to physically show the squashing and the stretching. I always just assumed that it looked like that since it was going that fast. I was wrong. We saw how robotic it looks when you don't add in squash and stretch. So, add the squash and stretch. It's important.

Reflection

If I were to go back in and redo this entire project from scratch, I would keep the shadow and change the clouds. I would also add in little tufts of grass and maybe try to make the clouds move. I like the way the shadows look, but maybe I could go back in and make them smoother, so they flow nicer.  I don't know how you could add tufts of grass, but there's most likely a way to do it. I added in the clouds in a way that I don't know if i could animate them, but I think if I added more of the clouds to the sides of it I could make them move. Maybe I could redo them in a different style, make them look cartoony and float past. But, overall, I enjoyed the project and cannot wait to animate again.